Toronto’s Love Letters offers pre-Valentine’s Day romance

Jacqui Burke brings A.R. Gurney's Love Letters to life

A.R. Gurney’s Pulitzer-nominated play Love Letters is a play built for two. Featuring just two actors, two chairs and two notebooks, the production is a minimalist’s dream, with no blocking, no background music and few lighting cues. In fact, the actors don’t even need to memorize their lines.

It’s this small-scale approach that attracted director Jacqui Burke to the acclaimed play, which will be presented by Encore Entertainment at the Toronto Centre for the Arts starting Jan. 25.

“Often times we throw a ton of stuff at [the audience],” Burke says over tea in her east-end Toronto home. “This show allows you to just invest in the voice and very simple acting, and the audience still goes where you need them to go. I’m not going to add any go-go dancers or elephants. It’s just going to be them up there doing what they believe and investing in their own choices.”

Love Letters, written byGurney in 1989 and adapted into a television movie ten years later, tells the simple and touching story of Andrew and Melissa, through a chain of letters they exchange over 50 years. Melissa is a quippy artist with a shrinking pot of luck. She marries when Andy is off at war, but later battles a bitter divorce and loses custody over her children, losing much of her happiness and some of her sanity in the process.

Andy, meanwhile, leads a more fortunate life, graduating from Yale, marrying and eventually getting elected to the U.S. Senate. His straight, play-by-the-rules personality and warm heart lead him to write such lines to Melissa as, “Sometimes, I let X be me and Y be you, and you’d be amazed how it comes out.”

Despite their separate lives, Melissa and Andy grow together throughout the epistolary production, as they share their deepest thoughts and minutia of everyday life.

Burke’s interest in Love Letters was not immediate. “When I first heard about it I thought, ‘Oh here we go, another stupid play about two privileged white people,’ ” she says. “[But when I] started to understand how gentle it can be and how honest it can be, I fell in love with the play.”

Preparing for the show requires more time and examination than expected. Burke has been reviewing the script with three sets of actors who will be playing Andy and Melissa on alternating nights, discussing the details such as the exact age of the characters when they wrote each and every letter.

“[You] need to know the whole structure of the piece before you go in or you lose yourself within the story,” says Burke, who worked as a stage manager for eight years before transitioning to directing in the ’90s. “You start to stumble emotionally.”

To help the actors get a sense of the time and effort that went into each letter, Burke asked them to write some of them out longhand. She expects that with each pair of actors that embody Andy and Melissa, a new tone for the play will transpire.

“When you’re talking about artistic voice, their own voices contribute to a very distinct telling of the story,” Burke said. She hopes audience members will return more than once to see the distinctly different versions of Love Letters (the perk: tickets are half-price for a second viewing).

Love Letters runs from Jan 25- Feb 3 at the Toronto Centre for the Arts. The rotating casts include Jerrold Karch and Merle Garbe; Martin Buote and Elaine Martyn; and Eddy Morassutti and Donna Jacobs. For tickets and more information, visit tocentre.com/studio/loveletters.

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